Monday, February 25, 2013

I've just recently re-read this story and, holy shit, this is some good, good, GOOD stuff. AJ Hayes mentioned in a previous Five Stories You Can't Miss that Bizarro is really coming on strong and it doesn't get any better than this one for bizarre and bizarro.

This is a story that makes you want to raise your game. You cannot read this story and not think, "What have I written recently that blows my brains out of my skull and will do the same to anyone that reads it?" This is Dark Genesis in one sentence.

As I said to AJ when I first read it, "Talk about your big bang theory."

What goes together better than York Peppermint Patties and Bizarro? Nothing, if it's written by Chris Rhatigan. That and the fact that that guy or woman with the red kettle? Probably in business for their own self.

Is it Bizarro? Perhaps. Is it a mash-up of all kinds of genres? Yes, which, to my mind, makes it Bizarro (by definition). Is it a zombie story? Maybe. The last little bit makes a good case for that. An end of the world story? Yep, it's that, too.

You know what it really is?

It's Cindy Rosmus. She throws everything into the pot and comes up with an extremely tasty brew, as always.

Friday, February 22, 2013

1) Daniel Mkiwa's The New Sleep in All Due Respect. This story so moved me that I sought out the author and begged him to send OOTG a piece. It's a fresh take on street crime and his keen sense for dialogue gives this barrio tale a realistic feel that's hard to find out therehttp://all-due-respect.blogspot.com/2012/06/issue-29-june-2012.html

2) It's probably already been mentioned by others in this series, but Nicky Murphy's Daddy's Girl in OOTG's Flash Fiction Offensive got my attention. A lot of emotion rises up from very sparse prose. The tale between the lines is brutal and unforgettable. http://www.outofthegutteronline.com/2012/07/daddys-girl.html

5) Going to Hell to the Sound of Sucking or How the Gimp got 86'd from Mac's by Jaylee AldeI'm bending the rules a bit, but this tale has its own story. There's no link because it didn't get published. Not yet anyway. Its subject was the cause of much backroom hullabaloo over at Out of the Gutter's Flash Fiction back office. I thought it was hilarious, bold, and irreverent. Three things I love. The rest of the FFO editorial staff said, "No fucking way! Hilarious, yes, but I'm not going to hell!" I recently contacted Jaylee to see what happened with it and I believe it will make it onto the virtual pages of some daring zine sometime soon. Watch out for it.

Monday, February 18, 2013

Last summer, at the age of 56, for some reason, I decided to start writing fiction and I had this idea that maybe there were places to publish online if my stories were good enough. I started exploring the internet and found Literary Orphans and this wonderful story. It was so good and everything about it was something I could relate to -- it wasn't some loftly literary thing, it was ... REAL. I was so impressed that I emailed the author, Joe Clifford, and developed an online friendship that led to me getting published many times. It's a good story. Read it.

Wow. I read this and felt things I'd never felt before. It is a great story about awful people doing the most awful things one could imagine and Funk makes the whole thing beautiful. How? I have no idea. Magic, again.

I'm putting this in not just for this story but for all the Jen Conley stories I read this year. She is just so good. Ms. Conley brings you into a vivid and real world and makes you see and feel things. I just love her writing. June is completely devastating in a completely lovely way. Someday, maybe, she will learn how to write a happy ending.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Gary Clifton has quickly become known for his gritty and quite funny stories about all manner of low-lifes. He's got two flash pieces up now at All Due Respect, "A Step in Time" and "Lucky." If you dig those, you should check out his story in the anthology, "The Last Ambassador to Pushmata."

Friday, February 15, 2013

A Twist of Noir is BACK! And I've got a story there, a happy, sugary, glittery, rainbowy, puppy-dog filledy Valentine's Day bit called "That Fucking Bitch Will Pay." Also check out some great stories by Katherine Tomlinson, Bruce Harris, and Patti Abbott.

Monday, February 11, 2013

I love Blood & Tacos, a magazine that pays homage to the 1970s and 1980s, the heyday of adventure paperbacks. The writing in Blood & Tacos is purposely and brilliantly campy, and the stories are uniformly entertaining. Drug City, U.S.A., featuring a character known as The Chemistrator, makes my list because of passages like this: “Dax closed his eyes and reflected on how things had gotten so out of control. There wasn’t any moment he could pinpoint, however. It had been a gradual process. He probably shouldn’t have started selling drugs, though. That was definitely a mistake.”

In my day job, I work for a politician, so I’m a sucker for a good political story. Victor Viral is a great political story about a campaign consultant working for a state senator. Both of the consultant and the candidate operate far south of ethical, and bad things happen when their unethical worlds collide.

This piece of rural noir (“I’ve got dead brothers in six counties all over North Georgia and Tennessee.”) is excellent on its own. But it really shines when read together with Panowich’s companion piece, Coming Down the Mountain at Out of the Gutter Online’s The Flash Fiction Offensive. Both stories tell the same tale from different perspectives, and the result is tremendous.

McGowan’s contribution to this charity anthology is the terrifying tale of a woman who moves into a new house and is tormented by the (figurative) ghost of a previous resident. The terror builds steadily throughout the story and, best of all, it doesn’t let up at the end.

This is a classic noir tale: A clerk at a rundown hotel in the middle of nowhere can’t help himself when he finds a cooler full of cash, despite the fact that the cooler is in a room with a corpse and the obvious smart thing to do would be leave and call the cops. Needless to say, things go poorly. And nobody writes about things going poorly better than Beetner.

The Innocent Man by Pamela Colloff (Texas Monthly)

I’m going to bend Chris’s rules just a little to tip my hat to the best non-fiction article I read in 2012. Michael Morton, convicted of murdering his wife in Williamson County, Texas, is the titular innocent man. His story is a frightening look at how the justice system can go horribly wrong when the police and prosecutors -- through incompetence, conspiracy, or a mixture of the two -- don’t do a good job. Here are part one and part two of Colloff’s article. (It looks as though part one now requires free registration, and part two will probably go that route as well. It’s worth it.)

Erik Arneson’s stories have appeared at Shotgun Honey and Near to the Knuckle, as well as in NEEDLE and Off the Record 2: At the Movies. He also has a story in Otto Penzler’s upcoming Kwik Krimes anthology. He blogs at erikarneson.com and tweets @erikarneson.

Perhaps the second funniest thing I read. Mellick rarely does short fiction and although his books are often humorous, I wouldn’t usually put them in the humor category, but this fits the label. It begins with a levitating Walrus Master saying to a young man, “Blessings, my child. I shall answer you three questions. What wisdom do you wish me to bestow?” The young man responds, “What the fuck are you doing, dude?”

The narrator (or perhaps Scott McClanahan himself) goes to Walt Whitman’s old house. They don’t let him in, so instead he goes to the nearby Walt Whitman mall. They don’t have any Walt Whitman books in the mall’s bookstore. The Walt Whitman mall is near where I grew up, so I got a kick out of that.